Dark Empires

Dark Empires is an unreleased Sega Mega Drive fantasy tactical strategy game in development at Sega Technical Institute from 1990 to December 1991. The game pits two factions of fantasy creatures against one another, tasking players with defeating the opposing leader unit in order to claim victory - with plans to feature gameplay spanning a range of evolving time periods. Players alternate between a zoomed-out command view where groups of units are moved across different planetary battlefields and a close-up tactical screen which shifts to a hexagonal grid for unit-based combat. Player-controlled boss fights, roaming wild dragons, and an unimplemented experience system would have expanded the game with additional mechanics, though the surviving playable build shows many of these features still in development.

Although development advanced to a first-playable stage, Dark Empires was eventually cancelled in December 1991. Artist Craig Stitt recalled that while the project's fantasy themes suited his own tastes, its niche strategy focus did not match Mark Cerny's push for broad-appeal showcase titles at the studio. As a result, the game was discontinued in favor of more mainstream projects like Kid Chameleon. Long forgotten, it resurfaced only when Stitt uploaded footage of his 1995 video resume to YouTube in August 2020. Five years later, Stitt shared the game's ROM with Alexander Rojas during his August 2025 interview. As one of the studio's first projects, Dark Empires remains one of STI's more experimental undertakings, and would go on to foreshadow elements Stitt explored years later in his pitch at Insomniac Games for Spyro the Dragon.